Galaer on 10/1/2023 at 17:11
Personally I think there TDM has couple major flaws:
1) Some elements are still really janky. For example crates floating in water - if you try to pick them up they can randomly explode into air. Frob highlight is barely visible most of the time. Or frob helper option to be visible all the time and after some time it just vanish.
2) Overcomplicated and weird solutions. Here overcomplicated solution is mentioned putting body on your back and extinguishing candles. Both requires frobbing them to pick them up and then you need to use extra button to put body on back/exstinguish candle. And for candle you need to remember to drop it. This becomes annoying very quickly. Why can't I just do these actions by simply frobbing them? I don't want to drag body/pick up candle.
Weird solution is using map doesn't stop gameplay. It may be realistic, but at the same time how many players will play mission with map on their face? Also mentioned lockpicking on novice difficulty is weird. Yes, it's easy, but also super long. Higher difficulty only repeats sequence for lockpick when you fail clicking/releasing button in time. Novice requires holding button through 4 sequences for just one lockpick. In other words it's 4 times longer than on higher difficulty. And if you stop lockpicking at the last sequence of lockpick, it resets and you need to repeat all 4 sequences. So this is a classic case of long lockpicking, which can take couple of minutes for every lock in the game. Have fun.
3) Sound design. This is the biggest problem for me. While ambient sound being sometimes too loud and it's impossible to lower it with ambient sound setting, the same thing is happening in Thief FMs sometimes. The main problem is that every other sound is too quiet. Footsteps made by our thief are too quiet. When I jump on metal I expect it to be loud. And it's loud for enemies, but not for me, player. Difference between loudness of different surfaces (metal, marble, stone) is too small, so it's very hard to judge on what surface I can drop and on what I shouldn't, because enemy far away will hear it. Of course you can change sensitivity of enemies, so at worst they will 1st alert when you are jumping on metal behind them. But these quiet footsteps loud only for enemies are just annoying.
Even bigger problem are sounds made by enemies. They are too quiet. I can barely hear them when I'm very close. OK, that's realistic. But when they go into 3-5th alert and they start shouting and I can still barely hear them when they are close to me, that's not realistic at all. Shouting should be loud. Increasing volume of sounds made by enemies twice would elevate not only gameplay, but also atmosphere of many missions. Because right now atmosphere is based on graphic and ambient sound only. Also these quiet reactions ar main reason why we, ghosters, use tool to display stealth score. This isn't needed in Thief, because most of the time it's easy to determine alert or not. In TDM most of the time it's impossible, so we need to use tool that breaks immersion. And that's really annoying.
That's the reasons why I don't like this game. Of course there are better or worse FMs, but I would enjoy them all so much more if I wouldn't need to constantly fight with mechanics of this game. Despite immense effort of creators of this game and support of their community, for me it feels like it's not a full game, but rather a beta version. Maybe all these problems will be fixed in the future and game will be enjoyable for me. I hope.
New Horizon on 10/1/2023 at 17:55
Quote Posted by klatremus
- Set lockpicking to novice/beginner in the settings and its super easy.
Set lockpicking to Auto under the gameplay / difficulty section of the menu and it behaves similarly to Thief.
You can set the 'auto' picking routine to only repeat twice instead of 4 times. I'm not sure why it's setup to repeat 4 times because yeah, that is pretty annoying but anyway. You can use CTRL ALT ~ to bring down the console and type tmd_lp_autopick_attempts 1 then hit enter. Now when set to auto it will only repeat the lockpicking cycle once after the first cycle instead of 3 times after the first cycle. Unfortunately it's not setup to allow only playing the cycle once. Not sure why. I would request having it default to only playing the cycle once on auto because it's really punishing the player to sit through a bunch of cycles just because they prefer not to use the mini-game version.
wellingtoncrab on 10/1/2023 at 20:23
Quote Posted by Samantha1
I think the mission in which this happened was Iris. I would go to a beggar for example. He says "coins for the poor please?", I pass him without doing anything and he suddenly looks for me saying sth. Like "stop hiding" and when he finds me he runs away calling for help. Other npcs did that too.
I also dont find it realistic that it makes so much sound on metal. In real life if you slowly crouch over metal it doesnt make a sound either. Thief is more realistic in that regard.
Sorry to hear the mission turned you off TDM. The setup with AI in Iris is not typical of a TDM mission. The beggars are typically neutral to the player - not sure if you passed them brandishing a weapon such as the blackjack? You can holster your weapon using tilde.
If you’re willing to give the mod another chance I agree the default acuity of AI in TDM is too high - though many players seem to like it - thankfully these are also configurable in the difficulty settings and I recommend lowering the ai vision and hearing to “forgiving” in addition to setting the lock picking to training.
Perhaps Iris is not the place to start either. I know marbleman recommends “full moon fever” for new players.
Samantha1 on 11/1/2023 at 21:04
I had no idea you can even turn down the acuity of AI in TDM... I think my biggest problem with the mod was that I couldn´t find any explanation of things. I tried looking in the forum, but it´s not easy when you don´t know where to start looking in the first place. After the training mission didn´t really help, I decided to just start with an FM and finding out stuff by trial and error, which didn´t work either as you can see. But I´d gladly give TDM another chance. I´ll pm you :)
Edit: Oh, It seems I cant send you a pm...
wellingtoncrab on 12/1/2023 at 02:55
Quote Posted by Samantha1
Edit: Oh, It seems I cant send you a pm...
Yeah unfortunately it appears I don’t have permission to use the private messaging system. Feel free to email me (which I have ok’d in my profile) or pm me on the TDM forum!
